Officer, Arrest That President!

President Obama has cast the widest possible net for criminality in the financial realm, a net that he might come to regret, as he himself falls easily within its coverage. Indeed, according to the reasoning offered by this most famous president of the Harvard Law Review, he may, by a Sophoclean twist of fate, turn out to be the great criminal he has set out to find.
Obama used his weekly radio address of January 26 to introduce Mary Jo White as his new chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In that context, he repeatedly described the focus of his and the SEC's attention as "irresponsible behavior" in the economic realm. Back when America was dreamily described as "a government of laws, and not of men," one might have sounded an alarm at a president presuming to criminalize anything so vague as "irresponsible behavior."
These days, when only a fool would imagine such quaint niceties are relevant any longer, we may dispense with the formality of...(Read Full Article)